Proposal

The tag office=government is used to tag government offices of a (supra)national, regional or local government agency or department. In these offices, staff work directly for the government and carry out tasks to administer facilities, operate registries and licensing bureaus, regulate lands and/or people, etc.

Examples include the ministry of foreign affairs, the tax office, or the local roadworks authority.

The tag can be used for offices of all branches of government: executive, legislative, and judiciary (bot note that courthouses have a more specific tag amenity=courthouse).

Subtypes

The government=* tag can be used to define subtypes of government agencies. Examples include:

government=ministry to indicate the main seat of a ministry or department. Do not use this for all offices and services resorting under a ministry, i.e. do not use this tag for prisons or tax offices even if they fall under the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Finance, respectively.

Rationale

The tag office=government is already in use. However, it is defined as referring to for national/central government agencies, leaving office=administrative for local governments. This proposal instead suggests office=government for all government agencies independently of admin_level.

The tag amenity=public_building never had a clear definition. It has been marked as 'Don't use' on the wiki, apparently without discussion, since 2010 (see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dpublic_building ). It is used for a wide range of different things, such as government buildings, train stations, expo halls, art centres, municipal sport centres, and band stands, amongst others. Nearly all of these have more specific other tags.

The tag is still widely used (111 941 instances), and supported by JOSM. For this reason, and because marking the tag as "Don't use" has never been discussed with the community before, it seems to make sense to discuss the status of this tag with the community.

The tag amenity=register_office (1053 instances) is relatively widely used. However, having a separate main key for every type of government office would lead to an explosion of the number of main keys for government offices. Consolidating all government offices under one main key, office=government, will aid data consumers that are not interested in the exact type of government building.

The tag office=administrative is used in some countries for local government offices. However, the tag is poorly chosen as the term 'administrative' does not automatically excludes national government, nor does the tag 'government' exclude local government. It is also not clear how intermediate levels, like German Kreisen or Dutch provinces, should be tagged.

I prefer to start with a small number of example values under the government=* key, so that the discussion can focus on the main key rather than a complete list of all possible types of government buildings. It is always possible to extend the list of values later.

I oppose this proposal. see here for the reason: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2016-February/028583.html in short, "government" is not a good term for a global project. Also I don't think that deprecating often used tags like amenity=register_office or office=register or office=tax is a godd thing to do and I don't buy your arguments for doing so (you can always make any tag combination more generic and add more subtagging levels, in every field of application, but there's no gain from it, and I don't think that office=administrative is a synonym for office=government and you don't say whether this tag will be applicated to a building or also to a site. Btw.: amenity=public_building seems to be a tag for a building, so it cannot be replaced by office=government which is a tag for a function that can also be on a sub-building level or cover an area with several buildings--Dieterdreist (talk) 10:58, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

I oppose this proposal. "discouraging" frequently-used tags just makes life harder for mappers and harder for people using the data. Don't do it. --SomeoneElse (talk) 11:29, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

I oppose this proposal. I refuse deprecation of "office=administrative". We should tag a function, not an ownership of the office. What are pension funds and registry offices doing in the "government" tag? They do not govern (although controlled and owned by a government), they administrate and execute social functions. So they must be put into "administrative" tag, not into "government" tag. --Surly (talk) 16:42, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

I oppose this proposal. I agree, that current scheme needs to be changed and clarified with good definitions to be able to reflect different branches of government as Dieterdreist said above. But proposed scheme is incapable to do that. ---BushmanK (talk)